Chandra Unplugged - No nonsense, Straight-up blogging from a Life Coach

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

© Mountaindreaming, from the book The Invitation published by Harper San Francisco, 1999, All rights reserved

 

Living Your Truth - To Be True To Yourself is the Work of a Lifetime!

1.  How we live our experience of Truth determines our authenticity.

• We may have had an epiphany, a glimpse of how things really are, and intellectually we “get it”, but can we put it into practice?
• Can we bring it back into life and can we “be” what we know. 
• The process of coming out of our heads and into out hearts into the present moment, is the path toward authenticity.

2.  You cannot think your way to authenticity – you must feel it.

• And in order to feel, the mind must be quiet.
• When the mind is quiet, the heart opens and finally we are able to sit squarely in the middle of our life, to feel it, rather than think about it.
• If the mind never stops, you can never be authentic.

3.  When the mind is frantic, you hear all those voices in your head other than your own.

• To hear your own voice, to live your own life – not the life of your mother, your father, your partner, your boss – all the other voices have to stop.
• This is the process, the path to authenticity.
• Only through discipline and meditation does the mind become quiet.

4.  The more real you become the more potent your energy becomes.

• People pick it up; you radiate.
• A person’s energy is the vibration of their consciousness.
• Your energy goes out into the world before you.  It is the meter that pulls to it like energy.

5.  But being authentic takes work. It’s not just kicking back and saying “I’m’ just going be myself and let it rip.” 

• The price of authenticity is awareness. And awareness is consciousness in action.
• Being conscious means you have to be willing to stay awake when often it’s a whole lot easier to go to sleep.
• This is big stuff and not for the weak at heart. A lot of folks talk the talk but how many walk the walk?

Better to Compromise or Better to Be Authentic?

Do you think compromise is the solution for a troubled relationship? If your friends, family and therapist are telling you that compromise is the key to a successful relationship, it’s important to understand that authenticity, not compromise, is the foundation of all solid relationships.

• Compromise is useful for deciding dining or entertainment; not for what nourishes your soul.
• Chinese or Italian? A hockey game or a movie? These are the things we need to compromise on.
• When you compromise on being real that is the kind of compromise that hurts you and hurts the relationship.

2. You can’t be for someone else what you do not want to be for yourself.

• When you “compromise” on things that make you feel bad about yourself, that is a bad compromise.
• Compromise means that you are willing to do something you initially do not want to do, and that you are not going to be resentful when you do it.
• If you are resentful, that is a good indication that the compromise in you did not come from a clean place.

3. What is in darkness always comes to light – don’t hide your feelings to get love.

• Often we do not say how we really feel and tell ourselves it is best to “compromise”.
• But when you deny your true feelings and you compromise from an unloving place, you will always feel resentful.
• What does not come out one way will find another way. I have a friend that used to call this “strange outcroppings”. She'd say, You push it down over there, and it pops up over here.”

4. Over time, “compromise” builds resentment. Be real, be brave.

• It takes real bravery to have a great life and a good relationship.
• Bravery is difficult and requires that you dig down deep into the core of your being to muster fearlessness.
• To access bravery you must be willing to deal with the anxiety that comes from digging deeper.

5. Listen to your inner voice – it has your best interests at heart.

• Your inner voice will let you know what is going on.
• It will tell you whether your ego is holding on to having it your way, or whether you can let go with grace and ease and compromise.
• Remember, it does not always have to be about you.

The TRUTH about Spiritual Experiences

1.  Let’s talk about spiritual experiences so we can get that over with since there is a lot of hype out there.

• Many of us have bought into the idea that attaining consciousness is an experience, perhaps a divine one, but an experience anyway; the final step in a long earthly journey.
• But nothing could be farther from the truth.
• TRUTH is, not a noun a place that we get to and stop, but a verb, an experience that is constantly moving.

 2.  I have known people who have had wild and intense spiritual experiences and I’m here to say they have very little to do with consciousness.

• Often on drugs, people have experiences of oneness, only to wake up the next morning and feel separate and alone.
• You can have a spiritual experience and still live a very unconscious life.
• And that’s because spiritual experiences pass, just like everything else in the universe. Everything is moving and changing all the time.

3.  I often tell this to my clients when they have an epiphany.

• I tell them that that’s great, but what are they going to do about it?
• Unless you do something with your realization you might as well be taking drugs, smoking a joint.
• You know, the next morning when you get up you can’t remember those earth shattering realizations.

     So remember, - It is not about the experience you had, but about this present moment, what you are experiencing now. That is where true spirituality occurs. We may have had a divine experience of the Truth but have we internalized it – can we live it?

Checklist for Authenticity

Being Authentic
1. You stop partitioning your life. Life is whole and it is all connected. 2. You ask for what you need; you do not make the other person guess. 3. You take responsibility for all of your life – If it happened to you, it belongs to you. 4. You are brave. You do not run from things that scare you and you know what you are most afraid of will set you free. 5. You listen to your own inner voice rather than listening to others. 6. You live in the present moment – rather than in the past or in the future. 7. You stop telling everyone your story. No one cares, and besides, it keeps you a victim. 8. You change what doesn’t work. No whining, complaining or excuses. 9. You have generosity of spirit. You want the same things for others that you want for yourself. 10. You have a quiet mind. The dog needs to be wagging the tail, rather than the tail (the mind) wagging the dog.

Quieting The Mind, Opening The Heart

Aside from showing-up, the only other thing I ask my clients to do is meditate: 10 min in the am and 10 min in the PM, for unless the mind is quiet we can never access feelings and be present.

In order to slow the mind, we need to understand its nature. Everything has a nature: Water is wet, a leopard has spots, phones ring and the mind has thoughts. But rather than allowing the mind to have thoughts the same way we accept that water is wet, we think we are those thoughts and that we have to do something about them. We identify with those thoughts and chase after them. The more we chase them, the more they run, until we are plagued by a mind that will not stop, a mind that never rests.

To access feeling, we need slow the mind. When the mind is quiet, the heart opens. In true meditation, we do not attempt to lasso the mind or corral thoughts; that only makes it more unruly. What happens when we say don’t think of an elephant, that’s all we think of. True meditation is not soft music, visualizations or astral traveling, or pushing thoughts away. Real meditation takes place in a state of witness consciousness, i.e., we watch the thoughts all the while knowing we are not the thoughts, as though we were watching a movie. Regardless of what we see, good or bad, we watch like we are watching a movie.

All thoughts are neutral. We give them energy by thinking we are those thoughts. When we watch without reacting in any way, we acknowledge the nature of the mind by becoming one with it. This is when the mind begins to slow down; this is the beginning of peace.

As the mind begins to slow, we begin to connect to what makes up tick, to our own inner core and by connecting to what is real in us, at that very same moment we also connect to what is real in us all. This is what it is all about - the connection - and the connection is about being human. Our stories may be different but the underpinning of those stories, the soul of those stories, is the same. That soulfulness, that essence is the inner voice. Call it your true Self; call it consciousness, God, whatever you are comfortable with, but that energy is the same in us all.  The more that we can feel that, the more we are able to accept our own humanness, all of it: the good, the bad and the ugly, and the more connected we feel to the rest of humanity. This is what makes us whole.

Now many people feel that vulnerability is a sign of weakness but that’s not my experience. I feel vulnerability is strength. Real bravery and courage is the result of both fear and vulnerability. We feel afraid, but we reach out anyway. Can we really be brave when there is no fear and nothing worth protecting? When we are brave and vulnerable we connect to being human, all of it, and when we accept and touch the pain, even though it scares us, that vulnerability instantly connects us to others and breaks down the walls of isolation. Our vulnerability breaks the illusion of invincibility and the feelings of isolation.  Touching our soft underbelly connects us to one another, and for the moment, we stop feeling separate. This is the divine paradox. What we are most afraid of sets us free. It is about loving and being loved because of our humanness, not in spite of it. This ultimately the only thing that heals.

Remember, we come to this earth in a human form for a purpose, it is not a fluke. We are in this form because we have human lessons to learn. No matter how much we study philosophy or practice spiritual disciplines, if these things take us away from our humanity, they are doing us a disservice.

To truly connect to reality and have a life that works, we need to accept our human existence and all that it entails. Only then are we rewarded with a deep solid feeling of joy that is more than a momentary high. This is how reality works.

Asking for Help? Leave the Agenda Home!

So…if we know we need to be present to experience reality, and the only way to do that is to feel, how do we learn to feel? We have been so conditioned to think our way through life, we are so hard-wired, that we naturally go through the world believing we can use our thinking mind to make it work.

Now I’ve been coaching clients for many years now and when they come and see me they always ask me what tools I use and what they have to do. They are always surprised when I tell them “no tools”. They invariably want to tape our sessions, take notes, have homework, journal, do something. Now these tools may seem noble, but in reality they are just another distraction, a way to stay in your head. Tools may point the way but they are not the way and any tool that’s picked up at some point has to be put down. I tell them I will ask only two things:

1. They need to show-up and 2. I am going to teach them to meditate and that they need to sit for me 10 minutes in the AM and 10 min in the PM. We are going to learn to quiet the mind.

When you show up it means just that and nothing else. And when you show-up with no agenda, there is an openness that invites in what needs to be looked at and felt. In other words, there is no set way to do things. That doesn’t mean we don’t address pressing problems, but rather that we trust the process and pay attention to what comes to the surface. The presenting problem is simply a point of entry, not an agenda to be rigidly adhered to. So…when you have no agenda, you are open to opportunities and realizations that you would not normally be open to.

When you show up with no agenda, you are ready to receive. I understand that oftentimes there are very pressing problems, but trust me when I tell you there is no particular subject that will enlighten you, no particular topic of conversation that is any better than any other one. Any place is a good place to open and enter; life is whole and what had energy will rise to the surface. Trust this process and that this is what needs to be looked at. This is the real stuff, based on the sub-text; what we really feel, not what we think.

For example, many of you would like to be in a relationship and quite naturally hold a certain physical image in your mind of what you want that person to look like. Now the problem with that is that if your ideal man is a tall, with blond hair and blue eyes you will miss the short man with dark hair standing next to him, even if that’s your guy. I mean do we really care what someone looks like if we feel love and cherished? After all, we get attached to certain forms because we think they will give us happiness, but do they? What is instead of holding the thought or image, we held the feeling; we felt what it was like to be loved and cherished. Now by letting go of our agenda, we have just increased our chances for happiness.

How To Experience What Is Real

I’m sure many of you have thought about the concept of reality and even had discussions on the subject. How many times have you heard someone say or even said yourself, “This is my reality and that is yours. But reality has nothing to do with what someone thinks, it simply is. When our life really begins to rock and roll is when our opinion of how it works and the way it really works are the same, they are in sync. The space between what we think and how it truly unfolds determines the amount of incongruity in our lives. This incongruity gives us pain, suffering and confusion and is in exact proportion to our separation from reality. When there is a wide gap between what we say we want and what we keep getting, this is a clear indication that we are not “getting it”, we are not in the flow, not connected to reality.

So…if we just think for a minute and remember a time when things just went our way. We say the timing was right, the people were right; everything seemed to just fall into place. I’m sure if you can connect to the feeling you can feel the effortless quality, the ease with which things unfolded. Very little thinking takes place in this space, and that’s because we are present, squarely in the moment. We are not in our heads, we are centered right here; directly experiencing what is. When we are present we “know” there is no gap between our opinion of reality and how it really works.

The key to experiencing “reality”, i.e., “what is”, is to be present, and the only way to do that is to “feel”. What we are talking about here is not emotions, but that spot in the chest that resonates as truth. And to do that, we must pull the energy from above the neck to below it.

We can never really know anything with the mind, because the mind operates in the world of duality. As the Tao says, when we find one thing beautiful, we find another thing ugly. Only by dismissing one idea, does the intellect or mind accept another. But to really know something, we have to experience it unconditionally, to step outside the mind. To test the “realness” of something, we must feel it, and to feel, we must get out of the mind and into the body. The minute the energy settles in the heart, we become present. At that moment we are no longer one step away from the action; we are the action. Rather than thinking about our life, we are living it. This congruence of being present is reality. 

Open or Closed?

We talk about all the different ways we feel in an attempt to understand what is going on, but somehow all our all our searching never sets us free and we end up more in our heads then when we began.  That's because we are trying to "figure out" intellectually what is happening rather than "feel" what is happening. 

If you cannot feel your life, but think about it instead - you will always be one step away from the action, rather than being the action.  Ask yourself, "Am I open or am I closed?" 

Being open means you are willing to feel your feelings even though some of them may be painful.  That does not mean that you do not look at your behavior, but rather you do not want to keep making the same mistakes and end up closing down. When you are open, you feel the feelings and they pass on through.  Remember you have only one heart; it's either open or closed.  When you close it to hurt you also close it to love.  It's all energy and it's all moving.  EVERYTHING passes, nothing stays.   Open to life and automatically be open to love.

Ask yourself - Do I feel hard or do I feel soft?  Am I open or closed? 

Being in the Present Moment

I have a client that moved from Tampa to California to take a better job.  It was a good move and one that made a lot of sense.  He came back to Tampa last week to see me and during our session told me that he has been very sad since he got here (four days ago).  When I asked him why he felt sad, he said, "Because I miss Tampa."  I said, "Where are you? Right this moment, Where are you?" He looked at me - at first puzzled as to what I was asking him, and then he got it.  (BTW, when he was here in Tampa, he was waiting to move to California for it all to begin.)

We always want to be someplace other than where we are at.  Here he was sitting in beautiful Tampa and he was sad because  he wanted " to be in Tampa".  The mind is very tricky and if we let our thoughts lead us around, we will always be one step away from the action.  It is only in this present moment that you and the action become one.  When your life finally begins to rock n roll you never want to be any place other where you are at. Real peace, contentment and joy come from surrendering to the moment.